Computerised
indices are compiled for recording basic details about individuals or organizations,
on the basis that insufficient information is known before a decision can
be made on whether to open a file. Then there are blue-covered Subject Files,
intelligence on political parties and subversive groups. In the recent past
this included the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Militant
Tendency, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Class War, the British National
Party and the National Front. Now it is more likely to be Islamic extremists
and Irish Republican groups operating worldwide.

In March 1985, Cathy Massiter, an MI5 officer who left the service after 12
years, made disclosures to Channel 4's 20/20 Vision programme ‘MI5's Official
Secrets’ that the telephone lines of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND) and National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) had been tapped. The MI5
had classified these organizations as ‘subversive’, which in her
opinion was being overzealous: “We were violating our own rules. It seemed
to be getting out of control."

Cathy Massiter testified that she was required to compile a report based on
her MI5 files for DS19, a special unit inside the Ministry of Defence set up
during the tenure of Michael Haseltine. The MI5’s coverage was so pervasive
that at least four future ministers were ‘on file’. For example
this included Patricia Hewitt, then general secretary of the NCCL (1974 to 1983)
and Harriet Harman (NCCL legal officer from 1978 to 1982). On the basis of Harman's
marriage to Jack Dromey (who MI5 suspected of having pro-Communist views) and
the fact that Hewitt was a friend of William Birtles (who was a friend, in turn,
of D.N. Pritt, described by MI5 as a "staunch friend" of the Communist
Party), both women were branded on the MI5 files as "Communist sympathisers."

Among other pressure groups targeted in the early 1980s was the Anti-Apartheid
movement because the MI5 deemed it to be a front for a ‘revolutionary
communist group’. The Channel 4 programme also revealed that MI5’s
phone tapings included Mr Sid Harroway, shop steward convenor during the Ford
strike at Dagenham in 1978 and a communist. Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet
Secretary, defended this action in 1986 by stating that “the Communist
Party is still regarded in the United Kingdom as one of the organizations subversive
of parliamentary democracy”.

Harman and Hewitt successfully took their cases to the European Court of Human
Rights, which ruled in 1990 that the files on them were in breach of Article
8 of the European Human Rights Convention. This article guarantees protection
of private life.

During the 1984-5 miners' strike, an elaborate plot was conceived by the authorities
with the connivance of the media to villify the National Union of Mineworkers
(NUM) and its elected officials, Michael McGahey and, in particular Arthur Scargill
– Margaret Thatcher’s bete noire. The allegations against Scargill
blackened his reputation from which he has yet to recover.
Seamus Milne’s investigation into the affair also highlighted the role
of a British Pakistani, Muhammad Altaf Abbasi, who was among the group of prisoners
released by the Pakistan authorities in the aftermath of the 1981 PIA hijacking
carried out by the Al-Zulfikar paramilitary/terrorist group. On return to his
family in Britain, Milne writes, “Abbasi was regarded by many of those
active in Pakistani opposition politics in Britain as an agent of the Islamabad
government or of British intelligence”. Abbasi started a ‘Geen Book
Centre’ from which Gaddafy’s political tract could be disseminated.
In 1984, Abbasi contacted the NUM and offered to serve as a middleman with Libya.
In October 1984 Abbasi organized a meeting in Paris at which Salem Ibrahim,
Gaddafy’s representative put a question to Scargill: “Would the
miner’s leader go to Tripoli to explain the NUM’s position’?
Scargill refused, saying if Libya wanted to help British miners, it should suspend
the strikebreaking sales of oil to the United Kingdom”. Unbeknown to Scargill,
Abassi then coaxed a weak reed within the NUM ranks, chief executive Roger Windsor
to visit Tripoli. A photo of Windsor kissing Gaddafi on both cheeks rocked Britain
and effectively demonized the NUM and Scargill, because public memory was still
fresh with the killing of PC outside the Libyan embassy in London. The Sunday
Times was able to publish the minutest details of the movements of Abbasi and
Windsor in Tripoli – reportage which was to win The Sunday Times reporter
Jon Swain the 1984 ‘Reporter of the Year’ award.

A misinformation campaign then alleged that Scargill and another NUM official
Peter Heathfield had diverted funds from Libya to aid the strike effort to settle
their personal home mortgages. Ten years after the event, Seamus Milne concluded
that “every single one of the orginal claims proved to be untrue, unfounded,
wildly misrepresented or so partial as to be virtually unrecognizable from any
factual information…Nor, as the evidence now makes clear, could what in
fact were simply ‘paper refinancings’ have ever been made with Libyan
cash – because the fabled ‘Gaddafi money’ never even arrived
in Britain until long after the transactions were carried out. The central allegation
was a paper-thin lie, the by-product of a deliberate set-up…At every stage
and in every aspect of the affair, the fingerprints of the intelligence services
could be found like an unmistakable calling card. From the openly advertised
intelligence contacts used in the original Sunday Times scoop on Roger Windsor’s
1984 Libyan trip, to the CIA’s tame Russian miners who helpfully called
in the Fraud Squad….to the GCHQ leaks on secret-service manipulation of
the Mirror-Cook Report stories, to Miles Copeland’s warnings to Scargill
and Heathfield about an intelligence set-up, to Tam Dalyell’s Whitehall
tip-offs about Windsor and Stella Remington…the intelligence connection
ran like a poisoned thread”.

Abbasi himself denied dealing with the Security services, but went on the record
stating that “I don’t think it is an unpleasant thing to be a member
of an organization of a country of which I am a citizen. MI5 is there to look
after the security of the country of which I am a citizen and there is no harm
in working with it”. Abbasi’s hapless contact in the NUM, Roger
Windsor also issued an open letter to the MI5 senior officer during the NUM
crisis, Stella Remington [later MI5 Director General] that included the following
bizarre passage, “Perhaps you would not welcome a public enquiry into
all the events surrounding the NUM activities during and since the strike, as
it might reveal that you were not as effective as you might have liked to have
been, or as others would credit you” and concluded with reference to the
‘gross violations of civil liberties’ during the miners’ strike.

The NUM headquarters in Sheffield and the offices and homes of branch officials
were bugged. Transcripts from these taps were sent to the National Reporting
Centre at New Scotland Yard, which was responsible for deploying police officers
in the coalfields, and to MI5's F2 Branch. MI5 sent intelligence reports to
the Civil Contingencies Unit in the Cabinet Office. Undercover police and MI5
operatives masqueraded as miners during the strike, singling out miners for
arrest or acting as agents provocateurs to provoke violent incidents. In June
1984, two plain-clothes policemen were caught red-handed in disguise at the
Creswell Strike Centre in Derbyshire. Throughout the year-long dispute, the
security services leased the building opposite the NUM's headquarters at St.
James's House in Sheffield. Every single NUM branch and lodge secretary had
their phones monitored, as well as sympathetic support group activists and trade
unionists across the country.

MI5 was obsessed
with Scargill, who even had his own classification, - “Unaffiliated
Subversive”, said David Shayler. ‘Operatives covertly followed
him, tapped his home and office telephones and recruited an agent inside
NUM. When I saw his file it contained a massive forty volumes.

Last year,
after years of mounting concern that I had been wrong about Scargill,
I finally apologised to him for the Mirror's accusations. I had come to
believe that the cloak-and-dagger tales I had published were untrue and
that, just as Maxwell had suggested (probably disingenuously), we had
been misled. One key witness changed his mind within a couple of weeks
and another was ordered by the French courts to repay a debt to the NUM
which he had previously accused Scargill of stealing.

The whole
case against Arthur gradually unravelled and gave credence to the belief
that we had been duped by a secret service plot. Despite his denials,
our chief accuser Windsor was named in parliament as an MI5 agent - and
I was doubly convinced when the former head of MI5 said so ambiguously
that he "was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly
imagine".

In October 2002, the BBC 2 series True Spies described how Fords, which had
a giant car manufacturing plant at Halewood on Merseyside, only agreed to invest
there because of a suspected secret deal with MI5 and Special Branch. According
to Former Special Branch officer Tony Robinson the entire workforce was routinely
vetted:
“My senior officer said: 'One of your responsibilities, Tony, is to make
certain that the Ford factory is kept clean of subversives.' And part of the
plan drawn up was to make certain that work would carry on smoothly at Ford
without the expected Merseyside disease of strikes and layoffs."

The officer told the programme that every week Ford would secretly submit a
list of the latest job applicants to the local Special Branch: "We were
expected to check these lists against our known subversives, and if any were
seen on the list then strike a line through it……We're talking about
thousands and thousands of families dependent on continued employment...you
have a small group of subversives who can bring that factory to a stop, then
I think the ends justify the means."

Imam Shafiqur Rehman from Oldham, Lancashire was brought before a special immigration
tribunal – the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) - in August
1999 to consider a demand for his deportation by the Home Secretary on national
security grounds. The hearing was attended by two MI5 officers. The Times (17
August 1999) reported: “Witness J was head of the MI5 group that monitored
terrorism on the Indian subcontinent. Witness A was in charge of investigations
into Islamic extremists from the area operating in the United Kingdom”.
The charge against the imam was that he had raised cash and organised young
British Muslim recruits for the Markaz Dawa al-Irshad (MDI). Witness A stated
that a substantial percentage of cash raised by Mr Rehman’s group went
to fund a jihad in Kashmir. Mr Rehman and his supporters had done nothing in
this case but he was “regularly involved in jihad training. We are concerned
at the potential threat to national security”.

However an underlying concern during Imam Shafiq’s hearing was his allegation
that he had been approached to serve as an informer by the MI5 in 1997 and had
refused. A third MI5 officer at the hearing, Witness I according to The Times
report, admitted that in 1997 the Security Service had thought of recruiting
him. Imam Shafiq said that the deportation order was to punish him for his refusal.

The SIAC hearing headed by Justice Potts overturned the expulsion order and
said the Home Secretary had failed to show that Rehman posed a threat to national
security. The government subsequently took the case to the Court of Appeal,
which overturned the earlier ruling. The Court of Appeal law lords also changed
the definition of national security:

The three judges, headed by Lord Woolf, the Master of the Rolls, ordered the
SIAC to reconsider and suggested the commission had applied the wrong legal
test as to what constitutes a threat to national security - that to qualify
for expulsion the alleged risk posed by Rehman had to be directed against Britain.
While Mr Straw conceded that Rehman was "unlikely to carry out acts of
violence" in this country, he argued that his activities "directly
support terrorism in the Indian sub-continent" and were likely to continue.
Lord Woolf agreed that the "promotion of terrorism against any state is
capable of being a threat to our own national security". He said the Government
was entitled to treat any undermining of its policy to protect the country as
being contrary to security interests.

Imam Shafiq had been denied legal aid in his case, and was represented pro
bono by Sibghat Kadri QC.